Don Village elephants draw crowds

Tours in the Central Highlands are using more unusual transport to give visitors a special view of the area
Come on over: Visitors to Ede house in the tourism area of Lake Lak. The Dac Lac Province expects to draw 1.5 million tourists each year in the period of 2007-10.Leaving HCM City, our tour group travelled on National Route 14, passing through former battlefields to reach the Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands), an area rich in mystery and natural beauty that has become popular with foreign and local travellers.
Under clear skies, we rode on comfortable buses until we reached the streets of Buon Ma Thuot City and spotted groups of ethnic minorities, carrying farm products to sell at the market.
After a brief rest in town, we visited Don Village, famed for its domesticated elephants, to see a traditional suspension bridge crossing the magnificent Srepok River.
My friends enlisted the services of the elephants to take them to Yok Don National Park, which is full of tall trees and rare animals and birds.
While they rode with the elephants, I decided to canoe on the romantic Lake Dakmil.
"Many local and foreign tourists visit Don village just to see the elephant races. They’re organised in the village every year during the third lunar month," my cousin Thanh Le, a native of Dac Lac, said.
At the end of the village is a100-year-old wooden stilt house, built in Lao style with a high, steep roof.
The house is owned by an old woman whose grandfather moved from Laos to Viet Nam to hunt elephants decades ago.
At the house, the woman told us stories about weapons used for hunting elephants, which were hung on the walls of the house.
The tour also took us to Lake Lak, about 50km from Buon Ma Thuot, which covers 700ha and is the largest body of water in the Central Highlands
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